Paul Lynch's Pages

One problem with being a long term WebObjects developer is that I get extremely jaded when viewing other technologies. WebObjects isn’t perfect, there’s lots of room for improvement, but for a very early (’95/’96) web application server, it is remarkably mature. It has a persistence layer, application server and template engine, as well as a set of enabling frameworks and IDE. I had to discover those terms before even starting to look around. Names that are dropped on the WebObjects mailing lists include Eclipse, Tomcat, TopDeck, Cayenne, Struts, Tapestry. I have also read about Hibernate and Spring. A number of these are parts of the Apache Jakarta project. It isn’t clear to me that there is actually a strong preference for any particular combination, although Eclipse as the IDE seems to win hands down.